POETRY: FIGURES OF SPEECH
Alliteration is the repetition of the same letter or sound.
The soul selects her own society
Anaphora is the repetition of words or phrase.
Blow bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying
Answer echoes, answer, echoes dying, dying, dying
Antithesis is the balancing of contrasts in words or ideas.
To err is human; to forgive, divine.
Apostrophe is a direct address to some person or object, absent or present.
Heart! We will forget him, you and I tonight
Assonance is the repetition of internal sounds.
A word is dead when it is said.
Chiasmus is a sequence of two phrases or clauses which are parallel in syntax, but with a reversal of order in the corresponding words.
Works without show, and without pomp resides
Hyperbole is excessive exaggeration for literary effect.
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world
Metaphor is an implied resemblance between unlike objects.
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
Metonymy is a figure whereby the object is not named, but only some significant aspect of it.
He fought with the steel.
Onomatopoeic is the use of words of which the sound suggests the meaning.
With the murmuring of the mountains
Oxymoron is the use of words apparently contradictory of each other.
Parting is such sweet sorrow.
Personification is a figure whereby inanimate objects are endowed with human qualities.
Jocund day
stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops
Simile is an expressed resemblance between unlike objects. It is usually introduced by like or as.
The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she
Synecdoche is a figure by which the part stands for the whole or the whole for the part.
He fought with the blade.
Zeugma is applied to expressions in which a single word stands in the same grammatical relation to two or more words, but with some alteration in meaning from one instance to the next.
Obliged by hunger, and request of friends.